known. The town participates in the federally
funded Community Development Employ
ment Program. To receive $158 Australian
($126 U. S.) each week, a resident must help
repair houses, for example, or work in the
store. Longer hours earn more money.
To fight alcoholism, the Dunjiba council
has sent recovering alcoholics to programs in
Alice Springs run by Canadian native people
to teach others how "life can be great without
grog." Sports competitions are being created
to fill the void left by long-lost ritual ceremo
nies and dances.
One day at the races an Aboriginal man
asked for my notebook, "to write a poem":
Faces and the placesfor a dollarsmile. Drink
ing beer and cheap wine. Friendswith money
and with silly causes. He didn't want to sign
it, and I never saw him again. He was not
old, but he looked it, and it's probable that
between alcohol and anger he will die young.
But perhaps the changes coming into Oodna
datta make it possible that he will live to
write more.
roads that were really creek beds,
rock fields, and paths worn between
water holes by cattle. Several sand
dunes into the desert we reached Old Andado
homestead. The jarring tracks told us a lot
about the woman we were going to visit,
Molly Clark.
Old Andado is Molly's business as well as
her home, a 45-square-kilometer cattle sta
tion in the Northern Territory where paying
guests can savor solitude and see how the pio
neers lived. There's a telephone now, of
course, but Molly winces when it rings, and
as she answers, her soft voice can't quite con
ceal a sigh. Fifty years in the bush without
having to answer a telephone, and now this
solar-powered touch-tone device. But these
days people think it's a bother to raise her by
radio. After a conversation, Molly slips the
phone back inside an empty potato chip bag.
"Dust," she said. "That's the problem with
having modern appliances in the outback."
Molly, 69, is part of Simpson history; her
life illustrates the blows the desert can inflict,
the price you may have to pay to live here.
Veteran station managers, Molly and her hus
band, Mac, moved here with three young
sons in 1955 and "worked their insides out"
for two decades to build a new homestead
and acquire full ownership of the lease on
15,500-square-kilometer Andado Station.
They struggled through an eight-year-long
drought that ended in March 1966 with four
and a half inches of rain. "Within weeks it
was a paradise," she said. "There were
grasses we'd never seen before. During the
drought the government told us to shut
down, that the land had been grossly over
grazed, that so much seed had blown away it
would never come back. We said we aren't
going, we know this land." They had 600
cattle left.
They put their land smarts to work, and
the herd grew. But in 1978 Mac died after his
small plane crashed; a year later a car acci
dent killed one son. Then came an order to
NationalGeographic, April 1992